South Korea’s Fashion Doyenne

In 1947, at the age of 19, aspiring South Korean fashion designer Noh Myung-ja decided to change her first name to Nora. Her inspiration: the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play “A Doll’s House,” about a housewife who leaves her children and husband to discover herself.

Ms. Noh, who had recently ended a marriage of convenience that helped her avoid becoming a “comfort woman” to Japanese soldiers, soon left Seoul to study fashion in Los Angeles. So began a career spanning more than six decades, in which the designer’s name and brand, Nora Noh, became a driving force in South Korean fashion for more than three decades, from the 1950s through to the 1970s.

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The designer in the 1940s

“That divorce was the best decision I’ve made in my entire life,” Ms. Noh, now 85, said, adding, “I didn’t want to sacrifice being who I wanted to be.” Sitting in her boutique in Seoul’s posh Cheongdam-dong district, she was wearing fake eyelashes and dressed in a black suit by her eponymous label, which is known for its polished, tailored designs.

Ms. Noh’s life is the subject of a new documentary that opened Thursday in South Korea. Directed by filmmaker Kim Sung-hee, “Nora Noh” is a homage to the designer, whose achievements include staging the country’s first fashion show in 1956, launching its first ready-to-wear clothing line in 1963, and dressing high-profile women such as Yuk Young-soo, the former first lady and mother of current South Korean President Park Geun-hye.

The film’s climax shows footage from a retrospective of Ms. Noh’s career, which was held last year in Seoul. At the opening ceremony, Ms. Noh greets her longtime customers, many who are now veteran actresses in their 60s and 70s.

Despite the designer’s many achievements, her accolades aren’t the focus of the movie, according to the director, an activist focused on women’s issues and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.

“What really fascinated me were the choices Noh made in her life,” said Ms. Kim. “She was unusually brave. I wanted to find some kind of a message that speaks to today’s women from Noh’s stories.”

The movie, narrated in the first person by Ms. Noh, features a fictional re-enactment of the designer’s divorce, with actress Seo Young-joo playing a young and driven Nora. The film also draws from interviews with the designer’s celebrity clientele, including famed actress Um Aing-ran, who specified in her movie contracts that all the clothes she wore on screen had to be designed by Ms. Noh. Other fans included the Pearl Sisters, singers who favored Ms. Noh’s flared pants, and singer Yoon Bok-hee, who turned Nora Noh miniskirts into a national sensation in the 1960s when she wore them at her concerts.

Shinmi Park, an associate professor of clothing and textiles at Andong National University, points to Ms. Noh’s “keen eye for trends” as one reason for her success.

“She knew how to deal with the mass media—TV, radio and cinema—when they were just being distributed,” Ms. Park said, noting that the public learned about style through celebrities at a time when “not many knew what fashion really was.”

Born into an affluent family during the Japanese occupation of Korea, Ms. Noh grew up admiring the Western-style clothes worn by her mother, who hosted radio programs in Korean and Japanese for Korea’s Gyeongseong Broadcasting Corporation, which Ms. Noh’s father co-founded.

The designer began making clothes at age 12, but then she was forced into marriage at 16 in an effort to spare her from becoming a sex slave to Japanese soldiers during World War II.

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Ms. Noh held South Korea’s first fashion show, pictured here.

After enduring her abusive in-laws for two years, she divorced her husband at age 18—a bold decision at the time for a woman in Korea— and got a job as a typist at the Korean branch of the U.S. military government. She helped host parties for high-profile foreign visitors and their spouses, and attended the events in dresses of her own creation.

One foreign guest took note of her fashion sense and was stunned to discover that the young woman had made her own clothes. “She said, ‘you would make a great fashion designer,’” Ms. Noh she said. “That was the first time I heard the term ‘fashion design.’”

Though she studied fashion in the U.S., she returned to Seoul “to show to those who criticized me for divorcing—there were so many of them—that I am actually capable of something,” she said. “It was my way of revenge.”

The designer married again in the 1960s, but the marriage ended because her husband didn’t want to live his life as “Mr. Noh,” according to Ms. Noh.

Ms. Kim, the “Nora Noh” director, believes Ms. Noh’s story will resonate with a younger generation. “Many women are still faced with difficult choices today and many still struggle with them,” she said.

Though Ms. Noh’s clothing was at one time available to the masses, business suffered following the Asian financial crisis, and for more than a decade she relied mainly on a base of loyal customers to order her designs bespoke.

Now, she is working with Nora Noh’s current creative director, Kumra Chung, to launch the brand’s first international project since closing down operations in the U.S. in the late 1990s. The 2014 Spring/Summer collection will be available at Ms. Noh’s Seoul boutique beginning in late November.

After more than six decades as a designer, Ms. Noh calls herself a laborer and a “craftsman,” not an artist, arguing that fashion’s primary purpose is to serve people’s needs.

“I always wanted women to feel confident in my clothes,” she said. “Once you are comfortable in the clothes you are in, you can move around freely. Then your thoughts are eventually liberated, too.”

Corrections & Amplifications:

Nora Noh’s mother was a radio host, not a TV host as a previous version of this article stated incorrectly. During the interview, the designer used the Korean term bangsongguk, which can refer to both a TV and a radio station.